Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…

Monday, June 13, 2016

Doesn't the Number of 50 Dead at the Orlando Nightclub Turn Out to Be Misleading?

Are you (somewhat) surprised about the round number of exactly 50 dead from the Orlando nightclub?

So am I.

A coincidence like that is not unheard of, of course, but it turns out that the number is (slightly) misleading.

A day after the massacre, it turns out the number of dead was actually 49.

Not much of a change, agreed, but still: Why the number 50, then?

The media seem to have decided again to include the mass murderer among the "victims."

(Which is technically true, insofar as you are counting the "dead" per se.)

Now why would I use the word "again"?

Don't you remember United Airlines Flight 93?
It took forever to design a memorial for the 40 heroes aboard the plane who fought back against the hijackers on September 11, 2001, making it crash in a Pennsylvania field instead of on its intended target.

And when a design was finally chosen, not only did it seem to resemble, deliberately or not, a red crescent,
it seems like the number chosen to honor the victims was 44.

… so far it looks to me that whoever was in charge failed in a major way. My guess is that he or she became fixated on the idea that this was just
another hostage scenario, and ignored all evidence that this was a
terror attack for a full three hours. … Something doesn’t make sense here,
and I strongly suspect we are going to learn in the coming days that
the police response was terribly botched.

Here again, and horribly, we have an unmistakable indication that
Obama finds it astonishingly easy to divorce himself from a reality he
doesn’t like — the reality of the Islamist terror war against the United
States and how it is moving to our shores in the form of lone-wolf
attacks.

He called it “terror,” which it is. But using the word “terror”
without a limiting and defining adjective is like a doctor calling a
disease “cancer” without making note of the affected area of the body —
because if he doesn’t know where the cancer is and what form it takes,
he cannot attack it effectively and seek to extirpate it.

So determined is the president to avoid the subject of Islamist,
ISIS-inspired or ISIS-directed terrorism that he concluded his remarks
with an astonishing insistence that “we need the strength and courage to
change” our attitudes toward the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender
community.

That’s just disgusting. There’s no other word for it.

America’s national attitude toward LGBT people didn’t shoot up the
Pulse nightclub. This country’s national attitude has undergone a sea
change in the past 20 years, by the way, in case the president hasn’t
noticed.

An Islamist terrorist waging war against the United States killed and
injured 103 people on our soil. We Americans do not bear collective
responsibility for this attack. Quite the opposite.

The attack on the Pulse nightclub was an attack on us all, no less than the World Trade Center attack.

To suggest we must look inward to explain this is not only unseemly
but practically an act of conscious misdirection on the president’ s
part to direct out attention away from Omar Mateen’s phone call [in which he called the cops to pledge his fealty to ISIS].

True to form, the president spoke more words about the scourge of
guns than about the threat of terror. In doing so, he actually retards
rather than advances the cause of gun control he so passionately
advocates.